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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25246501">The Language of Love</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/1derspark/pseuds/1derspark'>1derspark</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(but it's not graphic), 5+1 Things, Drinking, Fluff, I tried to be historically accurate but there's A LOT to know about medieval Europe, Immortal Husbands, Joe is a fashion icon and no one can tell me different, M/M, Mild Smut, The Crusades, depictions of violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 04:54:06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,591</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25246501</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/1derspark/pseuds/1derspark</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>"How do you know me?”</p><p>Yusuf’s not smiling anymore. He’s serious, more stoic than Nicolo’s ever seen him. Then again they’ve never been anything to one another but faces in the fog of their minds and twirls of steel in the mud. There’s no time for impassivity when you're fighting like that. </p><p>“I have known you all my life. Only now, you speak back to me.” It’s rough the way he says it, grating in the throat. Nicolo finds himself suddenly chilly, despite the fire and fragrant drops of sizzling hare fat. </p><p>“Only in my language,” Nicolo says, trying to lighten the air. “That’s not really fair.”</p><p>Yusuf shrugs. “I was a merchant. I traveled to many places. Genova was one of them. Besides—” His eyes sparkle across the fire. “I have plenty of time to teach you.”</p><p>
  <i>(Or five times Nicky hears Joe speak his language and one time Nicky returns the favor.)</i>
</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Andy | Andromache the Scythian/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Minor or Background Relationship(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>175</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>2419</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Language of Love</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>So hi? I literally haven't written fanfiction in four or five years, but I watched this movie and I just had to. Immortal husbands, who meet during the Crusades and then spend the next thousand years together... I mean come on, how could I not? </p><p>I really love when couples speak different languages to one another (in another life I would be a linguist I swear) so I just had to jump on the Italian speaking train that this movie started between Joe and Nicky. But I had to throw in some Arabic too, it's only fair.</p><p>Language is weird and changes all the time so Nicky probably spoke Genoese (the Italian dialect in the city of Genova) during the Crusade and for a while onwards, so I'm just gonna say over the decades the way he and Joe speak the language evolves alongside it. I don't know, that's what I'm going for.</p><p>A big thank you to P, who edited this for me after I screamed at her about my love for this movie and these adorable fools. Without you babe, I'd never get anything done &lt;3</p><p>But anyway, I hope you enjoy it! Be gentle with me, this is the first time I'm writing and posting something in a while. But any comments I do appreciate. Happy reading!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>1</p><p> </p><p>To be in Jerusalem is to be hard of hearing.</p><p>Nicolo learns quickly there was no silence to be had in the city. Even on the way here, there is noise: the breaking of waves against a Genoese ship, the clamor of a thousand knights and horses, their armor clattering like heavy shells on the march to the holy city.</p><p>There is never silence. In Jerusalem it’s as if God were screaming, and with every hoarse screech the devil answered.</p><p>The battlefield is everywhere, and so is the blood. The sound of death, the sound of pain. Nicolo has dreamed in war cries for years, so this did not bother him. He dreamed in black curls, a dark helm pulled over an angry face, teeth bared and chattering in a language he did not understand but would soon come to hear very frequently.</p><p>He meets this man — the one that roars and tramples down swathes of armies beneath his feet — not too long after the fighting starts.</p><p>In the thick of battle, it’s hard to tell who is friend, who is foe. All you can really do is swing and stab away at whoever comes closest to you. The space about your body is more than just air, it’s the barrier between swords, and the difference between living on another moment or becoming fodder for crows.</p><p>When he sees the dreamwalker, the space no longer matters.</p><p>He breaks into a bloody grin, shoulders himself forward. He knocks aside anyone who comes too close. Breaks bones. Pierces flesh. All to reach the man, who does the same.</p><p>Between them, the sounds of war rise higher. And when they meet, all that exists is the screech of metal when their swords meet, the screaming of dying horses, the grunting they exert with each broad stroke.</p><p>Nicolo is struck first. The man has pulled him in along with the scimitar in Nicolo’s gut. He holds Nicolo closer than anyone has in a long time.</p><p>And before Nicolo dies he whispers in his ear in crystal clear Genoese, “I have waited for you.”</p><p>It’s the first untainted sound Nicolo hears in Jerusalem.</p><p>It is not the last.</p><p> </p><p>2</p><p> </p><p>Nicolo wakes up of course. Pulls himself out of the pile of bodies the man dumped his corpse in. Nicolo is trembling but alive, and he makes sure to plunge a sword right between the man’s ribs.</p><p>He falls. And rises. And the cycle goes on. Until Nicolo and the man who God made his enemy, his companion, his immortal, have graced every grave, every battle site in the area with their blood and intestines.</p><p>This happens for many years. And Nicolo becomes quite creative in ways to kill and maim this man. The man does as well, until the last few times when they fight they’re actually smiling through it. Especially when the man speaks Genoese. It’s filthy what he says. Cruel and evil, but teasing in a way that becomes familiar.</p><p>They hurl insults at one another in Nicolo’s language until they realize it's more fun to talk than fight. And Nicolo is tired of these particular war sounds.</p><p>One day, when they wake up from their jointed death and when they face the shared air of a battlefield together, they decide to lay down their swords instead.</p><p>Together they leave Jerusalem and the smoking ruin it leaves behind on the sky, a burning permanent orange, like the world’s stuck on a sunset.</p><p>They steal a couple of horses and ride hard north, passing the graveyard of what once was Nicolo’s army. Europe’s army. They hear that the Christians have taken Jerusalem. And Nicolo should feel something more profound about that, but he finds that he doesn’t really care. His life has become a tunnel vision and up ahead, sitting tall on a black horse, rests its focus.</p><p>They make camp in a grove of citrus trees. It’s surprisingly pristine, untouched, considering the amount of trampling Nicolo and his countrymen have done to the land since they got here. He doesn’t dwell on it. He watches his companion start a fire instead.</p><p>The man’s caught a hare, and has it spinning over the flame after skinning it. They haven’t said much to one another on their escape besides “Move faster” “Come here” “This way”. And for the first time in years the air between them is charged with something strange and unsure. Nicolo does not know what to do with him now that there is less blood involved, but he knows that they cannot part ways. He doesn’t want to.</p><p>“You don’t speak Arabic?”</p><p>Here in the citrus grove where all to be heard is the crackling fire and the insects in the trees, Nicolo finally hears the man’s voice for what it is. Higher than he expected, less gruff. But warm, and clear and in <em>almost</em> perfect Genoese, with only a whisper of an accent.</p><p>“No. I can curse in it maybe.” Nicolo shoots the man a smile, reminiscent of their famed battlefield snarl-grins. “You’re very loud and enthusiastic when you fight.”</p><p>The man grins too. “You’re one to talk.” He pauses, cocks his head at Nicolo like he’s studying him, and Nicolo supposes he is. To look at one another without the fighting, the metallic tang of blood in each other’s mouths to distract, is a privilege worth dying for. Nicolo suspects he’ll be fulfilling that particular privilege soon enough.</p><p>“I am Yusuf Al-Kaysani.”</p><p>“Nicolo di Genova”</p><p>“I know,” he says. <em>Yusuf</em> says. This man has a name.</p><p>“You know? How do you know me?”</p><p>Yusuf’s not smiling anymore. He’s serious, more stoic than Nicolo’s ever seen him. Then again they’ve never been anything to one another but faces in the fog of their minds and twirls of steel in the mud. There’s no time for impassivity when you're fighting like that.</p><p>“I have known you all my life. Only now, you speak back to me.” It’s rough the way he says it, grating in the throat. Nicolo finds himself suddenly chilly, despite the fire and fragrant drops of sizzling hare fat.</p><p>“Only in my language,” Nicolo says, trying to lighten the air. “That’s not really fair.”</p><p>Yusuf shrugs. “I was a merchant. I traveled to many places. Genova was one of them. Besides—” His eyes sparkle across the fire. “I have plenty of time to teach you.”</p><p> </p><p>3</p><p> </p><p>Thirty years to the day Yusuf and Nicolo were resurrected, they meet the new tenants of their dreams.</p><p>It’s strange to dream in the faces of women, when for so long it has been Yusuf. One of them is tall and dark-haired, eyes like sea glass, wielding something wicked and all-knowing. The other is shorter, but just as beautiful. She’s from the far East, and quick as a whip in a fight. Together they make a mockery of his dreams. They’ve been fighting for far longer than he has, and know so much more than he does.</p><p>He is curious, but not very inclined to go looking for them. Yusuf agrees.</p><p>Instead they make their way across Europe. Lingering where there’s less worry of them being spotted, where they can spend months together in a stolen house, a stolen bed, exchanging smiles between their lips and groans at the tug of skin.</p><p>It did not take long for them to fall into one another. Separated from Jerusalem and the armies they’d fought and died for a good hundred times, their minds clear up. They are de-stormed and replaced instead with warm exchanges by the campfire, language lessons on horseback, shy glances in the many marketplaces of the continent. It is no surprise to either of them when one night Yusuf reaches over the space between their bedrolls, and cups Nicolo’s cheek with his hand to draw him in close, and does not pretend it was an act committed in half-sleep and starlight.</p><p>Yusuf kisses him first, just as he spoke first. Nicolo is happy to follow. He learns Arabic, he learns all he can of the man who is becoming his world, his whole life, however long that life may be.</p><p>It’s dangerous really, to be so devoted, but they can’t die. So why should they care?</p><p>That doesn’t mean dying isn’t painful. These women are quick to remind them so.</p><p>They’ve made a small home for themselves in Sicily, where they’re both comfortable living and working. Here on the island off the mainland, a halfway point between their old homes, the culture of the Italians and Muslims mix freely. There are ten different languages spoken at the ports, and twice as many kinds of people. Yusuf takes to translating for the shipmasters down at the docks, while Nicolo works for the butcher upon which their small apartment rests atop.</p><p>They spend their days working, collecting money for their next inevitable move. After the workday is done, they lie in bed, exchanging funny stories of Norsemen on the docks and snobby old Sicilian ladies stuffing their baskets full of meat.</p><p>They are not focused on the women they dream of, refusing to chase their ghostly figures. They wait to be found.</p><p>Nicolo is found first, and gifted a slit throat from the tall one.</p><p>In the haze of his reawakening, he learns she is Andromache the Scythian. She killed him in an alley, giving him some privacy to bleed out at least. When he wakes he’s slumped against the wall and before him stands Yusuf, caged protectively around his body. And at his feet, is the other one, the shorter girl, her brains leaking out of her head and onto the dirt.</p><p>“Andromache, Scythian, crazy lady, call yourself whatever you want.” Yusuf is hissing. “I don’t care. Leave Nicolo be. Just because we come back doesn’t mean I like seeing it happen.”</p><p>He’s speaking in a mix of Genoese and the Italian dialect used by the locals here in Sicily. It’s a strange mishmash Yusuf only really uses when he’s stressed, or when Nicolo uses his tongue on him in bed, his mind working too fast to distinguish between the different sounds and syllables the language requires.</p><p>“I had to make sure,” Andromache says. She’s definitely not sorry about it. “If it makes you feel better, I did the same to Quynh when I met her.”</p><p>“She hit me with a rock,” the woman on the ground, Quynh, says. She groans and pulls herself up into a sitting position, a hand cradled to the hole in her head, sizzling a little as the flesh stitches itself back together.</p><p>She looks to Yusuf. “She hits harder than you.”</p><p>“I smashed you against the wall. It’s not the same,” Yusuf mumbles. He sounds almost insulted, and Nicolo cannot help but laugh. It hurts, but he feels happy.</p><p> Yusuf’s hands hover over the healing slash on Nicolo’s throat. Yusuf’s eyes are wide and dark as he examines it, gentle.</p><p>“Are you alright?” he asks, like he hasn’t inflicted worse wounds on Nicolo himself.</p><p>Andromache extends a hand to Quynh behind them, and pulls her up. She is wounded this woman, in the soul. Nicolo thinks she has been alive for a long time. He thinks she may be the <em>first</em> and she might have a lot to share with them. It will be difficult to get to know her, to pry the pain of her past out to the forefront. She is not like Yusuf, who scoffs and cries and proclaims love with every breath he draws.</p><p>He watches how Andromache’s touch lingers on Quynh’s forearm, and even when she lets go keeps her in the corner of her eye. This look, it is how he watches Yusuf. How Yusuf watches him. Like they’re not quite sure the other is here, by each other’s side. That they’ve been gifted something so good, and are deserving of it.</p><p>She will be hard to know, Andromache, but not impossible. Maybe some food will open her up and Yusuf found a tavern the other day that makes the best pasta they’ve ever had, with some good wine to boot.</p><p>“So,” Nicolo says when he stands. “Who’s hungry?”</p><p> </p><p>4</p><p> </p><p>Nicolo is not lonely. How could he be? He has all he needs in the world — a man who loves him beyond measure, and untested time spread out before them to do what they please with it.</p><p>After that fateful meeting in Sicily, much of their time spent is with Andromache and Quynh, across the world. Beyond the borders of Europe and into Asia, Africa, the islands in the Southeast, what will eventually become Australia, what will eventually become the Americas. It is hard to keep track of so many wars, so many changing names.</p><p>They do what they can, when they can. And though Nicolo is not lonely, he is often frustrated with how little they do, and how little it means.</p><p>But he has Yusuf, and together they air out their grievances at the end of the day. Sometimes with words, more often with their mouths and hands and cocks.</p><p>After Quynh and England, Andromache has no such relief. She walks the world colder than before, her face stony and unshakeable. But she continues on. She has no other option.</p><p>They follow her across the decades until one day they all dream in the tongue of war again. It takes the face of a handsome young man speaking French, bleeding out on a bayonet, while Napoleon’s flag whips, ripped, above a battlefield.</p><p>He is the first new immortal for Nicolo and Yusuf. They realize they are no longer the youngest.</p><p>His name is Sebastien Le Livre.</p><p>When they get to him he is more grief-stricken than Andromache. Sebastien growls and snaps at them for the first month of their co-inhabitance. Nicolo’s just happy he’s not snapping necks anymore. Yusuf and Andromache were unlucky on that front.</p><p>They learn it’s for his sons. The ones he’s left behind and the one he tried to help but couldn’t. It’s a pain both Nicolo and Yusuf cannot understand or offer comfort for. Instead, they leave that to Andromache, who offers some reprieve in the nightly drills she conducts for Sebastien, all while Nicolo and Yusef take to cuddling as they sleep. She trains Sebastien in the sword. The axe. Makes sure that his hands can do more than break neckbones.</p><p>Sebastien takes to the fighting like a duck does to water. Though the grief never leaves, it’s less present in his face, and comes out instead in the wars they fight themselves, making itself useful.</p><p>It’s 1980 in Milan. The new millennium lingering around the corner weighs heavily on them. It has been a long time since Jerusalem. They are no longer the same men. They’ve adopted new names. Nicky. Joe. Andy. Booker.</p><p>They are different people, but the same in many ways. Joe has adopted a fascination with Milanese fashion. On the days they’re not conducting reconnaissance (there are some big-time drug smugglers up in the foothills Andy has dragged them here for), Joe spends his time with Armani and Versace, toting as many bags of clothes as he can back to the flat. He plays dress up in the mirror for Nicky, strutting around the bedroom in billowy white shirts and hats with big brims, his smile wide and white and neverending. He still sleeps on his side as he always has, bracketed to Nicky’s back, unwilling to let go.</p><p>Nicky and Andy make it a mission to try every restaurant in Milan. And though they find many jewels, names worthy of scribbling on the takeout list they have taped to the fridge in the apartment, they spend more than a couple weekends crouched over the toilet bowl, while Joe and Booker bring them ginger tea and not so subtly giggle into their hands.</p><p>Booker drinks. They all know it and allow it. He can’t kill himself on it anyway, and they’ve all found their ways to cope. There’s no judgement on how, as long as no one’s hurt for it. But they’d rather he not drink alone, so they take turns going out with him to the bars and the liquor stores, buying the high end stuff and getting sloshed in the streets together.</p><p>Tonight it’s just Nicky and Joe with Booker — Andy’s tying up the finishing touches on their plan to raid the smugglers. The three of them are stumbling down a Milanese street at two am, Booker singing off-key in French at the top of his lungs.</p><p>He’s a horrible singer sober – drunk, he sounds on the edge of death. Nicky though, is more than drunk — he’s what’s considered halfway to alcohol poisoning for a mortal man, all courtesy of some red wine. As a result, he doesn’t really mind Bookers’ singing. Nicky sings along with him, though Nicky sounds much better.</p><p>Booker, wine bottle in hand, twirls his way around a lamppost, caterwauling what must be some bawdy French bar song from before most of this neighborhood’s inhabitants were even born.</p><p>He falls on his third circle around, the bottle shattering in the street. Nicky’s laughing so hard he falls over with him, and together they form a drunken chortling mess leaned up against the lamppost. Joe watches with his arms crossed, but he’s smiling.</p><p>“A thousand years you’ve been alive my love, and you still can’t hold your liquor,” he says, and it's in French for some reason.</p><p>“I’m not trying to hold it. When I’m trying I do better.”</p><p>“Joe’s doing better than you!” Booker slurs rather loudly. He’s resting his cheek on Nicky’s shoulder, eyeing the spilled wine on the concrete with a sad kind of longing.</p><p>“Shhh,” Nicky goes, finger to his lips. “Quiet.” He squints up at Joe. “And Italian please.”</p><p>“Oh?”</p><p>“Did you know Booker,” Nicky starts, even though the man most <em>certainly</em> already knows, and has heard this story maybe a thousand times, “That Joe spoke to me first in Italian? Italian! So far from home, it was nice to hear. Even if he was stabbing me while he did it.”</p><p>“That’s not very romantic,” Booker mumbles into Nicky’s shoulder.</p><p>“I disagree,” Joe says. “It was very romantic. I swept him off his feet with my first word. He couldn’t stay away from me after that.”</p><p>“You mean he kept killing you.”</p><p>“Same thing.”</p><p>Booker grumbles but says no more. Nicky runs his fingers through Booker’s hair, like he would a sick child, tender and loving. After a moment, Joe slides down to his other side, and though Nicky expects him to haul Booker up and march them back to the apartment before someone really does come out and investigate, he doesn’t.</p><p>Together they sit in the street, their friend between them, and keep him comforted while he sleeps. Exchanging fond glances over his head until morning when they leave for home, more sober, and ready for their next war.</p><p> </p><p>5</p><p> </p><p>In Malta they fuck a lot.</p><p>There’s no other explanation for how fond they are of the place. That’s the real reason, and no matter many times Booker might fondly roll his eyes, or Andy smirks when they announce their departure for the island, they still go.</p><p>They acquired a small cottage on the coast, isolated, with enough distance between them and the next house to be as loud and affectionate as they pleased decades ago. In the 1200s maybe. Nicky doesn’t really remember the specifics. All he remembers is how joyful their time was there. Alone and unabashed in their love.</p><p>Their arrival to Malta in 2019 is a little more subdued.</p><p>It’s been two days since their departure from Andy and Booker and the disastrous mission in Yemen that left them more fractured, more bitter, than any of them have been in decades.</p><p>The missions involving children are always more euphoric when successful, and always more horrifying when not. Andy just couldn't take it anymore. She asked for a break, and Nicky doesn't blame her.</p><p>To Malta they went, their little safe haven, and as soon as Joe had the door open, Nicky was on him. Hands in his hair, in those beautiful black curls, in the thickness of his beard, panting and desperate as Joe sucks a hard mark at Nicky’s throat.</p><p>They fall easily into the bed without parting, knowing the ins and outs of this house better than they know anything else in this world. Except each other.</p><p>Nicky strips and plants himself in Joe’s lap, winds his arms around his neck, and brings them together as close as they can be.</p><p>“Take it off,” he says into Joe’s mouth, fumbling with the bottom of his t-shirt.</p><p>It’s the last words spoken between them. Once Joe is bare, all Nicky can do is gasp and groan, grabbing harder at the lean stretch of Joe’s back, biting at the fullness of his lip when he thrusts. A thousand years and every time they do this it’s like new — every kiss, every drag of his cock feels like the first time.</p><p>Nicky comes with his teeth clamped on Joe’s shoulder, shivering through the aftershocks as Joe goes on, gentler but no less desperate until he groans and is finished.</p><p>They lay together quiet for a moment in the afterglow, Nicky tracing his hand down Joe’s back, over the imprints he made there with his nails.</p><p>Joe pulls out and then they are side by side, in their bed in Malta, where everything was once so good and untainted. It feels a bit like they’ve stained the place, but then Joe curls into Nicky’s side, nuzzling at his ribs and the love falls back into place. Nicky places a kiss on his head.</p><p>“Thank you,” Nicky says.</p><p>“What for?”</p><p>Nicky tugs at his chin so that their eyes meet. In them, he sees his life. He sees Andy and the rigidity of her shoulders — she is never untensed. He sees Booker, how he cries when he drinks too much. He sees Joe, here with him despite it all. How lucky that they, among all these good people, are blessed when they instead could be suffering.</p><p>“Being you. Loving me. I wouldn’t do so well at this alone.”</p><p>Joe kisses Nicky’s fingertips, light like a butterfly. Joe is precious as one, beautiful and delicate but so strong. Capable of bearing the thousand winds of the world, and flying on.</p><p>“<em>Sempre amore mio. Per te sempre</em>,” he says. And leaves it at that.</p><p> </p><p>+1</p><p> </p><p>It’s not as if Nile expected the nightmares to just go away. But she thought maybe they’d stop. For a little while. She’d felt so sure of herself these past few weeks, with Andy and Joe and Nicky. Booker’s absence still weighs on them all but she was doing good. She hasn’t let herself feel guilty.</p><p>But she wakes up with her heart in her throat, mid-sob, and once awake can’t stop herself from weeping.</p><p>While she cries she sees her mother and her brother, wailing over her own casket. Empty. They think she was blown up in the desert somewhere, with not a piece of her to be found and delivered to their doorstep by a kind-eyed marine carrying a folded flag.</p><p>All her nightmares before this had been about Quynh, and all the other horrors her team have endured. Horrible as they may be, they were tolerable. The people she’s found kinship with are strong. And yes, no one can be strong all the time but damn did these people try. They had to try.</p><p>While Nile was sure her family could endure her death, she wasn’t so sure she wanted them to.</p><p>But it isn’t about what she wants anymore. It’s about what’s best.</p><p>She wipes her tears away on her sleeve and steps out of bed.</p><p>They’re in Thailand. Holed up in some leaky, filthy, excuse for a hotel in Bangkok where Joe had tracked down a sex trafficking ring. They were supposed to make the drop on it tomorrow. Just the idea of doing so makes her queasy. She attributes it to the nightmare, and tells herself it will be better in the morning.</p><p>She makes her way into the common room where Andy’s sleeping. Her back is to the window and the balcony beyond. The light from Bangkok’s nightlife casts a yellow glow on the curve of her backside. It looks unnatural.</p><p>Andy sleeps peacefully for someone with so much baggage. Her breaths are even, and there’s no noise but for her whispering inhales. Nile wonders how she does it so easily, after centuries of pain and suffering and nightmares far worse than what Nile’s endured. She thinks maybe that she just forces herself to. Otherwise, she’d never sleep at all.</p><p>Nile plans on stepping out onto the balcony, where she can breathe whatever fresh air Bangkok has to offer, but she freezes and hides herself in the shadow of the doorway when she sees that Joe and Nicky have beat her to it.</p><p>They’d taken the room opposite of hers, on the other side of the common room, next to the bathroom with the broken shower and green-gray mold beneath the toilet seat. They’d gone to sleep before she did, yawning and stumbling off into the room together while she and Andy stayed up an hour longer to practice her Russian.</p><p>They’d seemed tired. But she guesses that Andy might be the only one who sleeps easily everyday in this rag tag group.</p><p>The sliding door to the balcony is cracked, and if Nile concentrates, she can pick up on their voices.</p><p>Nicky has his arms around Joe’s neck, and Joe’s hands rest on Nicky’s hips. They’re touching wherever they can, whatever they can get away with as always. It’s sweet, it’s loving, and it really blows Nile’s mind sometimes that they’ve been together for so long. A thousand years with someone? It’s like a fairytale, or a horror movie, depending on who you ask. But they definitely aren’t complaining.</p><p>They’re swaying a little, and Nile realizes that they’re dancing. Slow dancing on a concrete balcony in Bangkok and looking ecstatic about it. Nile realizes that Nicky is singing, too.</p><p>It’s soft and beautiful, really. He’s a great singer. It’s not in a language she understands, but she has heard it before. It takes her a minute but she realizes it’s Arabic.</p><p>For all the time she spends around Nicky and Joe, she’s never really heard them speak it. They stick to English or Italian for the most part. Maybe it's because those languages are the most common ones in the places they’ve been to these past few weeks. But Joe’s mother tongue? Not until now.</p><p>The song is a lovely, lilting thing and Joe’s gazing at Nicky like he holds the world in his eyes as he sings. It sounds like a lullaby — very soothing, quiet beneath the night-sounds of Bangkok, the car horns and chattering that make their way even this high up.</p><p>Nicky finishes the song, and Joe darts in for a kiss. It’s chaste, but tender. All they do for a while afterward is keep their foreheads together, eyes closed and breathe each other in.</p><p>She gives them one last fond look and slides back into the bedroom.</p><p>The song wasn’t for her, but she feels calmed by it anyway. Limbs looser, and heart lighter than it was before. She slides back under the sheets and falls asleep, dreamless, loved, and at peace.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Translation: (I used google translate if it's wrong and you speak Italian just let me know!)</p><p>“Sempre amore mio. Per te sempre”: Always my love, for you always.</p><p>Thank you for reading guys! Come follow me on <a href="https://www.tumblr.com/blog/1derspark">tumblr</a> if you'd like. (It's a lot of Marvel, Star Wars, The Witcher, and now these fools to look at). </p><p>Kudos and comments are appreciated :)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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